Man with a Movie Camera
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Man with a Movie Camera, sometimes The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film by Russian director Dziga Vertov.
Vertov's feature film, produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in Ukraine and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have 'characters', they are the cameraman of the title and the modern Soviet Union he discovers and presents in the film.
This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as stop motion animation, double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, animations, and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).
Soundtracks
The film, originally released in 1929, was silent, and accompanied in theaters with live music. It has since been released a number of times with different soundtracks:
- 2002 – A version was released with a soundtrack composed by Jason Swinscoe and performed by the British jazz and electronic outfit The Cinematic Orchestra (see Man with a Movie Camera (album)). Originally made for the Porto 2000 Film Festival. It was also released on DVD in limited numbers by Ninja Tune. This DVD edition is currently very much in demand and goes for prices higher than the other DVD versions.
- 2002 – A DVD of the film by the British Film Institute was released with a score by Michael Nyman. This score is readily available on several different DVD editions.
